Friday July 1st (part 1): Development

This morning I came back from the Arnavons to attend a wedding service of a friend’s daughter. When we arrived, the ceremony was just about to begin and I was asked to shuttle the groom and the groomsmen to the church in my boat.

It was amazing seeing all the boys dressed up in their black-and-whites, fake silk flowers pinned to their chest pockets, the reek of cologne overwhelming the smell of two-stoke oil. There was no electricity to power an iron so their clothes were wrinkled, and shoes obviously hadn’t been included in the suit hire so their scruffy work boots added some truth to the facade, but other than that they looked pretty impressive. The bride and bride’s maids looked spectacular too, though the brides maids all looked about twelve years old and they were all nervously smoking cigarettes.

It was, in context, an utterly absurd demonstration – the boys in their smart suits picking there way over the slippery coral rocks, up to the decaying church; the only building on flat land amongst the leaf houses and toilet huts built on sticks in the mud.



Kia's academic hub.



In its utter absurdity, this spectacle effectively summed up development in Kia for me – so many of the vain and arbitrary attributes of Western society implanted onto an entirely unrelated social landscape. So many good values could have been seeded here to help these people, instead the traditional values and practises had been cleared from the region to make room for others, none better or worse than the previous ones but all of them totally irrelevant to the local culture. Out with the traditional; in with the new and different and fascinating and destructive.

Ceremonies and dress are only the beginning; even traditional conservation values have been replaced with foreign ones that, being incompatible with the local culture, are failing miserably (as has been painfully evident in my work at the Arnavons). Governance too, where it was once at a local scale, has subordinated all of the meaningful social ties of kin-ship, to a new system, built in accordance with a line that a white man in London once drew on a map.



Kia school: there's no books, not enough class-rooms,
the whole area is eroding into the sea and that shed on
the left is the toilet.



All of this change, and in a decade or two when petrol prices climb out of reach of most Melanesians, they will have nothing meaningful to show for it – no effective sanitation, no sustainable healthcare systems, no better ideas of how to maintain food security, no fairer systems of governance, nothing.

It looks new and exciting to this generation, but from their grandchildren’s perspectives, what an incredible waste.